The present invention relates to a method for personalizing at least one card and more specifically the edge face of these cards, and to the cards obtained by such a method.
A card may be understood to mean a chip card, which may be of the contactless type, or other items which exhibit features similar to those described hereinafter. It may also be understood to mean a chipless card, such as a loyalty card, preferably made of a plastics material. The personalization may also be applied to items such as CD-ROMS or DVD-ROMS, which have similar features, notably in terms of their thickness.
They may be identification cards, such as, for example, bank cards and/or identity cards and/or transport cards and/or loyalty cards.
A card is defined by two opposite faces parallel in pairs, which will be referred to as the first face and the second face, and by a peripheral surface which surrounds the first face and the second face. This peripheral surface may also be referred to as the edge face or the edge of the card.
A card may be formed of a single material or of a plurality of materials, generally laminations, of various thicknesses. These laminations are sandwiched and assembled together to form a unit assembly. The cards may be of different thicknesses and include, for example, cards referred to as mini SD cards, with a thickness of roughly 1.4 mm, USD cards, with a thickness of around 1 mm, or even ID1-format cards with a thickness of the order of 0.76 millimeter as defined in standard IS07816.
To personalize cards, various methods that allow all or part of the first face and/or of the second face to be marked are known. Notably, it is known practice to print patterns, for example using screen printing. Such printing may allow the cards to be differentiated from one another by applying different colorways and/or patterns.
By contrast, the edge faces of these cards are generally white, and this may make them tricky to differentiate when stacked, for example in a wallet or a card holder.
There are, however, cards the edge faces of which are personalized individually, notably using a laser marking technique in which an alphanumeric code and/or marks are applied in the form of “bars”, for example. Such a method requires the cards to be personalized one after another, and represents a significant amount of time and technical investment.
The use of cards formed of one or more laminations and in which each lamination may be mass-colored is also known. Such an embodiment therefore makes it possible to obtain cards the edge faces of which are colored and can therefore allow the cards to be differentiated from one another with ease.
However, colored laminations are more expensive than the white laminations traditionally used and such a method requires a significant stock of laminations of various thicknesses and various colors to be held in order to meet the needs of the customer and the requirements of assembling the card. Such a stock may represent a not-insignificant volume and cost. This stock may also carry a significant risk of obsolescence.